Trade schools have been duct-taping student communication together for years. Today that ends.

The students you're trying to reach live on their phones. They research programs between shifts, after their kids go to bed, on a 15-minute break in the parking lot. They want fast answers up front, and then they want real information they can read and come back to: program details, financial aid paperwork, enrollment forms, start dates. Trade schools need to meet them in both places, on their schedule, on the channel that fits the moment.

Here's what modern students expect, and what most schools actually deliver:

• Where they live. Gen Z spends 6 hours and 27 minutes a day on their phones, and 38% of that time is spent messaging.
• What they expect. 66% of students now expect a response within 10 minutes of any inquiry– regardless of channel.
• What most schools deliver. The average institution still takes 47 hours to respond to a new inquiry.

The gap between what students expect and what most schools can deliver isn't a people problem. It's a tools problem.

Most trade schools still run student communication across three or four disconnected systems. An email tool. A texting platform. A contact and enrollment spreadsheet that's only sort of up to date. A CRM with preference toggles that mostly work. None of those tools talk to each other, and the people paying the price are the admissions team trying to keep up and the students waiting on a reply.

Today we shipped Lumion Communications.

One platform for every conversation your school has with a student. Text, email, AI-assisted replies, and an industry-first consent layer that keeps everything compliant.

All built into Lumion Engagement. Live for every Engagement customer right now.

What this changes

Stop managing five systems.

Every text and every email with a student lives in one inbox, on one screen, in one thread. Your admissions team stops tab-switching. Your director stops asking which tool the last message went out on. Everyone is looking at the same conversation, on the same screen, at the same time.

Meet students on the right channel at the right moment.

Start the conversation on text, where the first reply happens in 90 seconds instead of 90 minutes. Follow up with email when the moment calls for real substance: program details, financial aid packets, enrollment paperwork, start-date confirmations. Both channels live in the same thread, in the same inbox, with the same full history, so your team is always picking up where the last message left off.

Give every admin an AI second set of hands.

Inbox AI reads every conversation in real time and drafts a reply your team can edit and send in two clicks. Quick Replies turn one-line emails into 20-second sends. Nobody on your team falls behind because nobody is drowning in their inbox. Nobody on your prospect list falls through the cracks because there's always something queued up to send next.

Keep the enrollment pipeline moving.

Cross-channel automations send the right message at the right step, on the channel the student actually opens. A welcome text on day one. A program-details email on day three. A tour reminder text the morning of. Custom, consistent, hands-off. The pipeline keeps moving even when your team is in tour appointments all afternoon.

Never worry about compliance.

Quiet hours, opt-out handling, and a full audit log of every preference change happen automatically in the background. The platform does the work so your team doesn't have to remember the rules.

So what is Lumion Communications, exactly?

Lumion Communications is a single platform for every channel your school uses to reach a student. It replaces the texting tool, the email platform, and the disconnected spreadsheets your team uses to track who said yes to what.

Five pieces fit together inside it.

1. Unified Inbox

Every text and every email with a student in one thread, per contact. Green for SMS. Blue for email. Sorted in order. Your rep replies on either channel from the same screen, with the full conversation history right there.

2. SMS Marketing

Personalized bulk text campaigns to a segment, an automation, or a one-time list. Triggered campaigns from Lead Capture, Enrollment, and Funding forms. Built for the messy reality of an admissions team running ten campaigns at once.

3. Email Marketing

Two composers in one tool. A drag-and-drop builder for designed campaigns, plus a Quick Replies mode for fast one-off emails right from the inbox. Five to ten education-specific starter templates ship day one. White-label sending domain so every email comes from your school.

4. AI Replies

Inbox AI reads each conversation and drafts a reply your team can edit and send in two clicks. Staff stay in the loop on every message that goes out. No autonomous bot pretending to be your admissions team. The AI does the typing. Your team does the talking.

5. Contact Preferences

One place where every student's channel and message-type choices live. Every send in Lumion checks it first. Every change writes to an audit log with a timestamp, a source, and a reason. It's the part of the product you don't think about, until the day you need to prove what you sent and why.

"We didn't build this to compete with Mailchimp. We built it because trade school admissions teams deserved better than seven browser tabs and a spreadsheet." — Josh Haghani, CEO & Founder, Lumion

What's next on the Engagement roadmap

Lumion Engagement gives schools everything they need to capture interest, communicate effortlessly, and convert passive prospects into enrolled students. Lead capture, CRM & contact management, workflows, automations, and now Communications all live here.

Already on the way:

• Voice as a first-class channel inside the same inbox
• A/B testing for SMS and email campaigns
• Lead scoring to surface the students most likely to enroll
• AI Scheduler to book tours without the back-and-forth

Want the front-row seat? Stay up to date with our product releases and you’ll get the next launch straight to your inbox.

The proof

We don't just say it works. The data does.

• 24/7 always-on admissions. AI-assisted chat answers questions when your team is closed. The next morning, the lead is already qualified.
• 56.9% SMS response rate on Lumion, well above industry averages. SMS for speed at the top of the funnel, email for the documentation and detail that carries a student to enrollment.
• Unified inbox and multi-channel communications lead to a 40% increase in student response and engagement.

“Lumion helped us increase our enrollments by over 300%. They’re always on point, they truly care, go above and beyond, and have quickly becoming invaluable.”— Tyler, Founder, Western Welding Academy

How it all fits together

This is what Lumion has always been about. We exist to help trade and technical schools turn visitors into students, and students into success stories.

The Unified Inbox is where every conversation lives. SMS and Email are how those conversations scale. AI Replies are how your team keeps up. Contact Preferences are how it all stays clean.

The patchwork is over. Your team gets one screen. Your students get the channel they actually use.

Welcome to Lumion Communications.

How to turn it on

Lumion Communications is part of Lumion Engagement. There's no separate add-on, no usage-based bill, and no upgrade gate. Three paths in:

• Already on Engagement? Log in. Contact Preferences is on every contact record. The new composers are in Automations and Campaigns.
• On Lumion but not on Engagement? Your account manager can have you set up by the end of the week.
• Not on Lumion yet? Book a 15-minute walkthrough below. We'll show you what one tool looks like, on real data, with your questions.

Book a 15-minute walkthrough → On real data. With your questions.